A SERIOUS MISUNDERESTIMATION:

Orwell for Christians (Paul J. Griffiths, December 2004, First Things)

George Orwell is probably not much read by American Christians. When he is (unavoidable doses of Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four at school, perhaps) it’s not likely to be with the thought that his work might nourish a reader’s Christian or American identity. This isn’t surprising. Orwell had a vestigial affection for the rites and buildings of the Church of England but was otherwise opposed to almost everything about Christianity as he understood it, and especially to Catholicism. Among the many groups he considered the enemy and for which he had little but vituperation, Catholics and Americans figure largely, though usually separately. If you’re an American Catholic, you can’t read Orwell for the nostalgic Anglophiliac thrills you might get from Evelyn Waugh, or for the voyeuristic shudders you might hope for from Graham Greene. [...]

If one does read (or reread) Orwell, one ought not to do so expecting great or even competent novels. The novels are, as novels, mostly bad and never better than mildly interesting. Orwell knew this, and often lamented his lack of skill as a novelist. [...]

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is an extended rant about class, money, and literature, drawing heavily from George Gissing and in every literary way inferior to its models; its protagonist, Gordon Comstock, is among the most unsympathetic literary figures ever created, and the little liveliness he has flows from the fact that his unpleasantnesses are very like Orwell’s own. The best novel as a novel is Coming Up For Air (1939), which is coherently plotted, speaks in a single, affecting voice—that of a restless lower-middle-class insurance agent on the eve of World War II who attempts and fails to recover his lost, golden, pre–World War I childhood—and is a moving evocation of nostalgia, decay, loss, and anticipated totalitarian violence. [...]

Orwell’s theoretically skeptical prophetic meliorism resonates with much in Christianity, and especially Catholicism. Catholics do think that there is a natural order, that its fundamentals are accessible to the naïve gaze, that these fundamentals include the profound impropriety of torture, oppression, tyranny, the killing of the innocent, and the despoliation of the natural order. Further, the Catholic Church has no political theory of its own; it does not identify any political order here below with the Kingdom of God; and it is (in its best moments) properly skeptical of the idea that we can do any better than local meliorism in politics. Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, for example, protests against utopianism and perfectionism in politics for reasons very like Orwell’s. John Paul II’s address to political and economic questions during the last quarter-century has also refused to identify any particular solution to the political question as the right one but has instead concentrated on identifying instances of offense against natural law and natural right that belong to particular polities. His critique of the offenses that belong to Marxist polities is too well known to need recapitulation, and Orwell would have endorsed most of it. Perhaps more in need of emphasis is his critique of the offenses that belong to democracies: unbridled consumerism, commodification, an understanding of rights that embraces a right to kill the defenseless, and so on. This, too, Orwell would have endorsed.

It remains to ask, then, why Orwell was so largely vituperative about Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. The most basic reason is that he thought Catholicism just another example of a doctrinal system that encouraged its adherents to excuse and perform horrible deeds. In his view Catholic doctrine, like Marxism, moves at a level of abstraction and pretended completeness that forces an aversion of the gaze from particulars and encourages the malformation of that gaze. He draws this parallel explicitly in Wigan Pier. In addition to this general objection, like most of his generation in Europe, he saw the Catholic Church as an ally of fascism and therefore complicitous with the very worst tyrannies. In Spain, for example, the Church supported Franco, in large part because of the violent anti-ecclesiasticism of his leftist opponents. This anti-ecclesiasticism included the burning of churches, the killing of priests, and the raping of nuns. Orwell was aware of this: he records instances of it in Homage to Catalonia in a dispassionate way. He did not endorse such atrocities, but he also did not think they excused support of fascism. I don’t here offer any opinion about the rights and wrongs of the Spanish Church’s support of Franco in the 1930s and afterwards. I note it only to identify one source of Orwell’s hostility to the Church.

But along with this anti-Catholicism there is something else. Orwell’s substantive judgments as to which actions are indefensible, which actions ought always to be resisted because they are indecent or unjust or oppressive, are very often in accord with those of Catholic doctrine. His conscience was, by Catholic standards, surprisingly well-formed: he saw the evils of abortion, contraception, oppression, tyranny, and poverty. But there is more yet: there are sometimes glimmers of empathy. In Wigan Pier, Orwell writes favorably of those English working-class homes in which you can see “the crucifix on the wall and the Daily Worker on the table.” He likes this because it bespeaks a nondoctrinaire approach to both socialism and Catholicism: neither is taken to exclude the other, and each can be pressed into the service of resisting the unacceptable. As soon as either becomes doctrinaire, though, as Catholicism does in the “silly-cleverness” of the English Catholic apologists of the time (Orwell has Chesterton and Belloc in mind), and as socialism does in the polysyllable-chewing of the popular socialist orators of the time (“human barrel-organ[s] shooting propaganda at you by the hour,” as Orwell calls them in Coming Up For Air), then the game is lost. Then evils are justified, even encouraged, in the name of the system: Catholics become apologists for Hitler (Orwell reviewed the English version of Karl Adam’s Spirit of Catholicism in 1932, and although Adam was not then known in England as a Nazi sympathizer, the criticisms that Orwell made of the book show that he sees that trajectory in Adam’s work); socialists become apologists for Stalin; and violence, torture, concentration camps, and mass extermination spread without limit.

Nondoctrinaire Catholicism, then, can be a force for good in Orwell’s view. But there is more even than this. Orwell was deeply aware that the world in which he lived, the world of decaying and corrupting empire in Asia, of flourishing totalitarianisms in Europe, and of “sluttish” (a favorite word of his) commercial civilization in England and America, did not nurture the clear eye or the well-formed conscience. In 1935 he had the protagonist of Keep the Aspidistra Flying say that if you reject the corruptions of the money-god, of sluttish commercialism, then you have only three options: suicide, socialism, or Catholicism. And in 1949, a few months before he died, he wrote to a friend that “the problem of the world is this. Can we get men to behave decently to each other if they no longer believe in God?” He was by that time skeptical that the answer could be Yes. Of the three alternatives to sluttish commercialism he identified, socialism was the one he tried to embrace, but his version of it proved unacceptable to most socialists; Catholicism he could not manage; and suicide was, finally, the most attractive. He chose, against medical advice, to spend much of the last four years of his life on Jura, one of the most inhospitable of the Hebridean islands, to the detriment of his health (he was suffering from tuberculosis); and he worked himself to an earlier death than need have been his, again against medical advice.

Whether ultimately "Christian" or not, Orwell's work is undeniably conservative.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 19, 2005 10:58 AM